Review of Running with Scissors (2006) by Ggssbb B — 09 May 2011

Running with Scissors is a good book but it is a terrible movie and it is almost criminal that Annette Bening (Being Julia, Bugsy, The Kids Are All Right) gives such a phenomenal performance in such a bad/sad/bad production (she deserved an Oscar nomination for this performance).

The book does make lite of serious mental illness (here it is a bi-polar mother); but at the same time it offers-up some poignancy and bitter repercussions for its characters who move around dangerously as if they ARE "running with scissors" -- without taking any cautions.

Glee creator, Ryan Murphy, directs his first feature with Scissors and he throws-out both the poignancy and the bittersweet of the novel and instead goes for belly laughs and lamentable guffaws at full-speed (reckless!).

Set in the 1970's before the deluge of presciption drugs for mental/mind disorders and social acceptance, the film follows the memoirs of a young, homosexual Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross - Milk, Wide Awake, Flags of Our Fathers) who deals with his mother's bi-polar disorder even as he is sent away from his family to live with her eccentric psychiatrist, Dr.

Finch, played by Brian Cox (Braveheart, Troy, The Bourne Identity). The film has an all-star cast but since none of the characters are more than cartoonish human beings, the viewer cannot warm to any of them.

Augusten's father, Norman (Alec Baldwin - It's Complicated, Beetlejuice, 30 Rock), is "never home" even when he IS home as he's vacated the family life years before. Dr. Finch's family is even slightly strange so Augusten's retreat to "normalcy" is still anything but that.

Finch's wife (the most sympathetic person in the film) is a mild kook played by the late Jill Clayburgh (An Unmarried Woman, Love and Other Drugs, Fools Rush In) with a masterful off-base grace and their two daughters are played by Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare In Love, Bounce, Emma) and Evan Rachel Wood (Thirteen, The Wrestler, Across the Universe), who befriends the young Augusten as they are both of similar age.

Running with Scissors had everything going for it; but it is as if one fell ONTO those scissors as they were running and it became a tragic accident. There isn't much more to say ... it just went woefully awry.